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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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My own personal experience is that scientists and people with genuine expertise in a subject are way more softly spoken and uncertain about the topics they hold expertise in, particularly in friendly company and in private, than political activism would like. From personal experience, to keep things vague since the topic is niche, I actually had to tone down a claim that I already thought was already very modest about whether [some human activity] would increase levels of [some dust], even if it was the best way to link research to real-world impacts. Climate change is the obvious one, where IPCC reports are incredibly modest compared to claims made by activists, to the point they might as well be speaking different languages. And to bang my usual drum, claims about "The Science" for covid restrictions often didn't exist at all in literature, or were contradicted by it. Even something like lab leaks will see surveys reported as Virologists and epidemiologists back natural origin for COVID-19 when actually the survey findings was that said experts averaged 77% probability of zoonosis and 23% of lab leak, and only 25% of scientists reporting to be near certain that it was zoonosis, hardly a consensus.

As for this topic in particular, doctors who are inclined to cooperate and not "gatekeep" due to political pressure, and patients who are told to defect by lying to "gatekeepers" and get the drugs faster, is going to lead to disaster. Even if you're trying to implement standards in good faith here, they're just going to get instantly eroded.

There are definetly plenty of those with more mixed feelings. Experience shows that whenever there is an opportunity for scientific authoritarianism that gives scientists special status, whether with covid, climate change, or scientific marxism, plenty of them are willing to jump along. And they don't need to be all of them or even a majority, to be highly influential.

Calling something a science, and censor opposition as unscientific, are strong elements of modernity's fundamentalism. In a way that is convincing of plenty of scientists. Another possibility is those in charge to say that certain views are scientific truth and exclude from journals those who aren't going along.

Trained in a culture of peer science and trusting authority of the scientific clique, many are going to go along with it. Especially if they already have pro left wing biases.

This means that being a good scientist and doing science effectively is different and can in fact be opposite with the class of scientists and people called scientists, and their prejudices and preferences, which can show group think, and unwillingness to examine their conclusions.

It is the courtier phenomenon. Where power goes, there are always some people who go along with it. Another aspect of this can be that the media and people who belong in factions promoting group think have a benefit in associating science/scientists with particular views, and fostering a divide between them and then those who raise objections or oppose certain policies. Another facet of this are some edgier and more fantastical objections to claims on political charged issues that are focused upon over more substantive disagreements. For example

microchips

vs

Origin of covid. Lockdowns. Vaccine effectiveness.

Add to that censorship of dissent, and it would be a mistake to expect the people we have given the title scientists, or rational, to succeed in opposing this, any more an ideology given the title scientific will succeed at being scientific, just because it claims to be that, or to aspire to that.

My own personal experience is that scientists and people with genuine expertise in a subject are way more softly spoken and uncertain about the topics they hold expertise in, particularly in friendly company and in private, than political activism would like.

Jack Turban, Steven Novella, and David Gorsky - the authors of the two reviews I linked - are all doctors and scientists. Turban specializes in trans care, Novella and Gorsky don't, but their entire claim to fame (such as it is) is being part of the Skeptic movement, and the entire point of their blog is to inform the public of the actual state of evidence, not to repeat the activist line. If they talk differently in friendly company and in private, that means they're deliberately misleading the public.

Maybe none of this should be surprising, but the system that exists today wouldn't survive, if any significant number of people internalized that.